Nilofer Merchant is CEO and Chief Strategist of Rubicon Consulting. She has honed her unique, collaborative approach to solving tough problems while working with and for companies like Adobe, Apple, Nokia, HP and others; she's also the author of "The New How." This post was originally published on her blog, and is republished with permission.

Consultants do 3 things that suck. 1: Regurgitation

We have a bunch of information inside our firm. Sometimes, different parts know what they know, but they don’t share it across the silos.

Sometimes, different people withhold perspective.

Sometimes, people don’t feel trust that their opinion will be heard so they hold back until they work with a neutral 3rd party (who might just take the investment of ideas and turn it into something).

So the information is already there. And the consultant gets hired to find it and then package it back up.

2: They leave

Consultants create their answers, and then leave.

Well, usually they create PowerPoint (and if you hire McKinsey, then you pay a minimum of a $1M for those to be beautiful) slides that communicate their answer.

When they leave, very little transfer of information has happened. Most importantly, the understanding of the situation has rarely transferred.

In the best cases, the consulting firm communicates the big idea but definitely hasn’t had the detailed conversations within the company that will cause people to have a shared understanding. They leave having created the “big idea” and the organization doesn’t know what needs to happen to make it real.

Effectively we have a great strategy but because of they way it was formed (they went off and thought about it and came back with an answer), we can’t execute it.

2: Fight fair

Either in figuring out the problem or in picking amongst the solutions, we need to know how have tough conversations.

We would know what to consider more than other things. And when it comes to making the call, is it Bob or Nancy who gets to pick? Do we have a way to to choose amongst our many options (and this is the key part) without killing each other?

When we know how to fight fair, we:

Focus on the issue, not the person,

Remember that the goal is to fix the problem together

All gotta know WHY something got picked, so we can get aligned for all the other downstream decisions

Consultants arbitrate discussions so a solution can get created. But you know what would be more awesome?

Co-own

Once we got naked and fought fair, we would all need to co-own the implementation of that solution. We wouldn’t just do the discrete parts of any jobs we hold, but we would have a way to ensure the interdependent spots are covered.

We won’t just throw over requirements to engineering for them to build, or market something sales can’t support. We’ll find a way to mind the gap between the spots in the business (the intersection between marketing and engineering, marketing and sales, etc) where connections need to be made for companies to cross their Rubicon.

Companies almost always fail in the same inflection points, and these are places where no one party owns the outcome and the outcome has to cross over disciplines.

We need to know how to (a) identify, (b) discuss, and ( c) reward the intersection points that we need to co-own.

This is not unrealistic in our lifetime

Associated Press

After all, we know how to fly to the moon. You’d think we could get healthier businesses.

I’d like to get to that point where I no longer do management consulting because companies can do this stuff in-house. And before that, I’d like to never hire another advisor.

Until that happens, hiring a consultant is an optimistic act. It’s saying that winning is more important than not winning.

The first preference is always that companies would be able to strategize by themselves.

Second, I’d choose winning (with consulting help) than losing.

And in last place is the position where I know I need help but I won’t get it in a ‘not invented here’ thing that some companies and leaders do.

I say that we could eliminate management consulting in 10 years. What is your estimate?